THE BEEHIVE
In the year Two Thousand the tides of human travel through Grand Street had grown beyond all measure. They surged from morn to night in swaying multitudes in which the admixture of all the races of the great city were seen and heard. The babel of sound recalled the thoroughfares of a dozen cities of the world. The East Side, problem and despair of the twentieth century, remained the enigma of the twenty-first. Its congestion, at least, had met an approximate solution. Enormous high tenements had been built there, whose clustering stories became microcosms of national amalgamation, wherein were born diverse and blended groups who were endowed with remarkable pugnacity and a sort of fierce ability to engage in political argument and metaphysical civics.
They were not devoid of business sense and an inordinate thirst for money. On the whole they had made a most reputable element in the public life of the city, but they were prone to excitement, and they were not American. They responded with Celtic avidity to rhetoric and poetry, but they were not Irish. They were composed of a mixture that had outrun the mere boundaries of religious prescription, and Catholics and Jews in the close companionship of the Russians and the Italians, Hungarians and Turks had intermarried. These unions had grown more common, and there was a corresponding drift away from the orthodox formulas of each church. Socialism as a theory had taken a remarkable hold upon their imaginations but, though they were poor, there was no immediate justification for discontent in their lives. Pauperism was uncommon.
To the resident populations of the East Side, at this point (Grand Street), and north and south, there were commingled the steady streams of commerce and industry that crossed the Williamsburgh bridge at Delancey Street. These converging currents had produced a vortex of business along Grand Street, and so huge department stores, a few big and second class theatres, and tailor or clothing shops with the adventitious association of gregarious restaurants had grown into a solid wall of many hued occupations. At night the streets, especially in holiday time, and on the hot nights of summer swarmed and seethed with the jocund, good natured, and somewhat highly dressed throngs. The little parkway of the bridge’s approach on Delancey Street was set with tables and here gathered companies of friends and fun makers, who were supplied with wine and lager from the restaurants, while at the entrance of the smaller shops or stores similar tables had been instituted. The street then assumed the complexion and the purpose of a great and lengthened caravansary, or, on such nights when the stores were open, and the side walks accommodated the warring peddlers, an open air bazaar, or a Kalmuk fair grounds. The street then blazed with electric lights, and in front of the theatres and the department stores, the restaurants, and indeed at every hand, coronas, arches, and surcingles of lamps, contributed a chaotic confusion of haloes, and reflections and illuminations, that dispersed the darkness beyond the highest buildings, and eclipsed the discomforted and neglected moon.
It was in the midst of this multivarious human maelstrom and complex, that Longtinsky, the Russian, had made his abode, and established his paper, The Beehive, with which he furthered his insidious agitations and furnished a not unskillful compound of threats and grievances with the truth half dressed in fiction, and fiction wearing, a little stupidly, the mask of truth. The man had ability, and being unscrupulous, with a tenacious memory and an almost morbid alacrity in hunting out the peccadilloes of the rich (none of them worse than his own and his companions) he had gained a clientele, his paper a sort of subterranean circulation, and himself a modest fortune, though quite incommensurate with his ambition. Some fancied insults to him by the organ of the better classes had rankled in his mind, and he had exceeded propriety and prudence by recent utterances which were seditious and revolutionary; much more so than usual.
He had been goaded into a blind rage also by the unexpected and most unwelcome invasion of the district that he thought was peculiarly fitted for the ripening of his theories of social reform by the successful propaganda of Helen Lorimer. This had been phenomenally effective. Its courage fascinated a spirited people, and Miss Lorimer’s address and personal power, with a well established and practical commission of mercy was making havoc with Longtinsky’s reputation and prestige. It drove him to madness, and the fact that some of his young men-reporters, hired to dog and spy upon the less wary and more undeserving of the class he hated and plotted against, had, in their nefarious work encountered the beneficent agencies set in operation by Helen Lorimer, and having also met that engaging lady at her own settlement, had been flattered or actually been enslaved into a sort of devotion, which made of them furious mutineers against their soi-disant master loosened the last restraint of decency and caution.
Longtinsky understood well enough his danger. He did not propose to hang himself for any crime, but he had no hesitation in getting others into a noose that would have better become his own neck. He had become depraved to the point of murder, and his selfish and inflated egotism, provoked beyond endurance into resentment, slowly degenerated and assumed the worse complexion of brooding, sullen, hatred, the precursor of the worser incentives to atrocity and revenge.
The office of The Beehive was behind a clothier’s store not far from the corner of Pitt Street and Grand. It was entered by a narrow alley which debouched into Grand Street by a covered shed, and might have been easily overlooked by any one not accustomed to use it. The alley threaded, a door, entrenched in the brick wall of a back extension opened upon a small irregular room which served as the editorial sanctum, and the council chamber of Longtinsky, and his sympathizers. Behind this again a small projection shielded the archives and the printing press of the incendiary sheet.
It was the day after Miss Lorimer had entered her plea for the reconsideration of the sentence of the convicted Socialists, and which the Mayor had deferred to with such unction, that a rough and shaggy looking man, with a slouched hat, half covering features that might have reasonably craved some such concealment, walked into the open alley that led to the penetralia of the Longtinsky establishment. The man showed no hesitation in making his way, and a shrewd suspicion, that he had been there often before, would have occurred to any observer who noticed his nonchalant ease, the half dissimulated scowl with which he turned towards the street, and scrutinized the passing and oblivious crowds, his slow ingress through the crooked corridor, and the questioning and companionable rap that he gave to the inner door which the next instant he pushed in, and within which he disappeared.
In the furtherance of the ends of this tale we must follow this figure. The room that the man thus invaded was dark, the few windows that were intended to help out its interior illumination being extremely dirty, and in a measure curtained by ragged curtains, that rivalled in their disarray the neglected panes they partially covered. A few gas burners had been frequently used to dissipate the gloom, and the effects of their imperfect combustion were discernible above them, in sooty patches on the low ceiling. At this particular moment, although it was almost mid summer, the jets were alight, and by their helpful aid the visitor, if the matter interested him, could recognize the two pictures which decorated—or were expected to serve such a purpose—the walls. One stared him in the face, as he entered the room. It was a colored chromo of the great Russian novelist and humanitarian—Tolstoy—depicted in his peasant costume, amid his ancestral acres, his hat in his hand, and his crumpled and benign face looking out upon the world he repudiated and failed to save. The other possessed a less perceptible congruity with the room and the purposes of its usual occupants. It represented a most commonplace scene of rurality and domestic peace, and was called Rest at Home. This pleasing pictorial note in an atmosphere that quite generally was filled with threats against all such chimerical fancies, portrayed a farmer’s family, gathered around a hospitably covered board, in which the artist by a series of conventional imitations showed the products of the farm, with the ostensible father of the prosperous and numerous group, standing at one end of the table, his face upraised, and his hand, in the posture of a blessing, stretched out over the abundant food; while his sons and daughters in attitudes of respect or reverence, formed before him a most irreprehensible assemblage of duty and devotion. The alert mind might have thought that this unexpected illustration was intended, as an eloquent reminder, to those assembled below it, of the very thing and things they were commissioned to upset and prevent.
The remainder of the room’s furnishings requires but a few words. There was a long narrow table—so narrow as to comfortably allow those who sat at it to attack their opponents or critics across it—in the centre of the room, a few chairs, an additional oil lamp on the table, and in one corner a wooden box of the sturdiest construction, armed at its corners and along its sides with iron. The door leading to the editorial precincts beyond was open, and the few operatives there, could be seen leaning over their tasks or engaged in conversation which seemed curiously low and timid.
The man whom we thus persistently have followed, overturned a chair at his entrance, and then striking the table with his fist, proceeded to reveal his lineaments more completely, by removing his hat which he threw on the table. He was a short thin man of a Sicilian type, with black hair which would have abundantly screened his small head, if it had not been so suspiciously shaven into a crop of bristling points. His deep set eyes, rather high cheek bones, prominent nose, regular mouth, shaded by a restrained moustache, a handsomely chiselled chin, united into a facial whole of properly noticeable contour and expression. Craft was marked in his face, and a physiognomist might have been readily led to prognosticate a sum of evil possibilities in the Italian visage, which again in less questionable environment might have been mistaken for that of a star of the opera. So easily do the reflexions of our surroundings lend a deleterious, or responsible air to our physical personalities!
He wore the clothes of a workingman, somewhat refined by a little more careful preservation, and by more expensive texture. One surprising and noticeable feature of his dress was the small shoes which clothed his feet, made from patent leather, and a scarf and pin, the former of a brilliant scarlet, and the latter of emerald, expensive items which shone all the more conspicuously in their plain and discordant associations. As he rapped the table he flung himself into a chair, and waited for the response which apparently he fully understood would quickly follow.
He was not disappointed. A heavy movement of chairs in the neighboring apartment announced the approach of his host, and the next instant the broad squat figure of a man filled the doorway, between the rooms, and the visitor looked lazily up and accosted his friend.
“Well, Tinsky, have you heard the latest? The Old Man has given a reprieve and the thing’s to be done over again, and I don’t feel sure that the nippers won’t get a twist on your wrists this time. There are some squealers about, and perhaps they are as little anxious to get the ‘tickler’ as you.”
A curious smile covered the speaker’s face, and at length he raised his eyes, previously dropped to the floor, and gazed at the editor of The Beehive with a queer suppressed grin of malice, that was distinctly irritating.
The man thus accosted was a teuton in type, blond haired, thickly whiskered, with blue eyes, inconspicuous eyebrows, a short and heavy frame and a disproportionately developed mouth, and—his most striking feature—immense ears that protruded from the side of his head with an unquestionably porcine saliency. For an instant this aberrant arrangement caught the eye of his observers before they fully scanned his face. The face itself had a mean look, and this arose in part from the lowness of the brow and the smallness of the eyes, but particularly from a misshapen nose, full and drooping cheeks, and from the formless gap across his face, which served as a mouth. Had any one unexpectedly encountered him under circumstances of possible danger they would have instinctively shunned his company and suspected his intentions. His eyes squinted slightly, and this added to the sinister and depraved expression of his face. In some lights, and under the influences of conviviality the editor of The Beehive might have appeared more reassuring. At this moment pricked into a momentary aggravation by his remorseless friends, his looks were disappointing. His eyebrows drew together, his little eyes shone vindictively, his great mouth twitched with anger, and his malformed nose, set between them like a red proboscis, displayed its cavernous nostrils. Longtinsky was distinctively unpleasant to see at that moment.
“Oh, the jig is not up yet, Pony. I am not afraid of the tyrants. My arm can wither at my side before I’ll stop the crusade of justice and liberation I have begun. What about squealers? Do you think I have anything to fear? Can you or anybody else put any crime at my door. I don’t want to hear any nonsense and I won’t listen to any threats. Am I the man to be chased to death by a mad rotten pack of smooth faced, slick tongued, wine-fed vampires of wealth, men who do the bidding of that besotted purse-proud boasting wench, Helen Lorimer? I’ll pull destruction down about their ears. I’ll make this city Hell-hot for them. If they dare to touch me I’ll burn their roofs over their heads. Let us see how far the arrogant slaves of money and gluttonous indulgence dare lift their hands against the sons of toil and suffering!—”
The speaker had risen in his imprecatory rage, and his body, not visibly afflicted with any signs of want, pressed against the table, while the voluble spirit that possessed it glared through the shrunken blue eyes at the stranger. That person quite imperturbably waited for the exhaustion of the Socialist leader, and even ventured to raise an impatient hand as if to check his speech, while at the few moments when he condescended to look at him at all, something like a masked grin covered his features. This was not unnoticed by Longtinsky, upon whom it had an unexpected influence, for, as it finally forced a loud laugh from his auditor, he stopped and sank back in his chair with a cowed motion, as if of fear.
“Say!” it was Pony who was talking, “what do you think I am. Perhaps you had better keep your mouth shut and the tongue in your head tucked a little closer to your lamb-chops. I don’t want any oratory. Get that off on your scrubs. I know you, Tinsky, and you know me, or if you don’t by God, perhaps the time has come for me to show you who I am. I’ll do it damn quick.
“Now get down to business. Where’s the swag I’m to have for playing your spy. Don’t you get behind my back and rip me. I know you for a mean spirited swaggering coward, and I know, Tinsky, as well as you do, that you did the business for the Settlement House. YOU,” the man stood up, “put the bombs there YOURSELF; YOU hired the poor wretches to go in there after you and your fellow—and, damn you, you haven’t had soul enough to try and save him—Polinck, had started the fuses. What did you care if they got blown to Hell, as long as you kept your mouse haired body safe? Well, there’s been a leak somewhere, and that woman Lorimer has got on to it. She’s wise. Now Tinsky, keep your soft soap jabber for those who relish it, I want none of it. I’m here to do you a service. Get out of this. Scuttle the shop and move. The Mayor and that woman have get their heads together and they’re after you. The case comes up again next fall and you’re in for it. I want my money, I want it now, and I want to see the little girl. If it wasn’t for her I might not have come back. See! Let me see her now, and let’s start. Get your word twisters off their perches, pull down your winders, pick up your snacks, tuck some boodle in your breeches, and get out of this. Canada for us.”
The effect of those adjurations and reproaches upon Tinsky was remarkable. It only offered another tribute to the force of truthful words, forcibly uttered. The editor had lost some of his color, some of which was temper and much of which was beer. His hands nervously plucked his beard, and he looked at his stormy interlocutor with real dismay. His bravado had suddenly vanished, and in its place a sullen discomforting sense of danger overwhelmed him, but it was resisted by the man’s refractory egotism, and his stolid apathy to advice. Flight meant surrender, impotence, loss of prestige, it might mean detection, conviction, and punishment. He could not reconcile himself to an abject retreat. The danger pictured by his picturesque and implacable friend was a real one, and yet he shrank from an absolute disclosure of ineffectiveness and alarm. Under the smarting sense of guilt his mind, not unfamiliar with labyrinthine devices and coarse subterfuge, worked fast.
There emerged before him a desperate project, which if successful would establish his fame, might help him to rid himself of his embarrassing assistants—such for instance as the man before him—and, blackened as it was with the aims of murder, might finally light those fires of insurrection which he fondly thought were latently glowing in the hearts of the people, would clear the way for his assumption of power, and—so vividly did the picture work itself out—lift him into a position of eminence. Once there he might hold the balance of power and dictate the terms of his own acceptance and the shape of a future socialist plebiscite. The outlines of this plan—if plan it could be called which involved many elements of crime—had been vaguely worked out before in his audacious and credulous mind, but now at the storming point, when the enemy was forcing him to bay, when the incredible play of chance seemed to stretch out to his waiting hand the implement to strike the blow which would bring him immunity and place, they grew more distinct.
The cerebral convolutions behind that low forehead were intricate; thought of some inventive force hurried through them with an easy flow, and designs, pictures, dreams, rose before him with imaginative poignancy. His fear of danger—a danger which seemed literally heralded by its messenger before him—his hatred of Helen Lorimer, the stupid vindictiveness of his nature, which urged him on upon a course of rapine and disorder, his thirst for wealth, the sudden inner consciousness that he had been playing false to his own people—though bribes which he had taken from the “Aristocracy of Wealth” had only been accepted with hypocrisy and rage—his powerlessness hitherto before the inertia of the masses, who had failed to raise any standard of revolt, already broken hearted as they were over the conviction and condemnation of their companions, his perception that he had played into the hands of his enemies in doing as he had done, the residual force of a conviction that he was really working out, besides his own fortune, a greater destiny for society; all these considerations drove him to an ultimate step which he often vaguely realized might be useful.
It now became to his mind a necessity. It was desperate, and like some tempting demon, it rose before his eyes with beckoning gesture, though in his hands it carried the weapons of destruction, and its face was darkened with the shadow of assassination. Longtinsky was not averse to involving in his plan some steps looking towards the forcible removal of the unwelcomely candid man who had just entered his retreat.
Longtinsky had been thinking fast. As his visitor paused Longtinsky got up, shut the door leading to the inner room more carefully, and locked it. He moved to the windows and drew down their shades, then he passed around the head of the table, walked past Pony who had become a little restive, though he eyed these preparations with no apparent disturbance, unless a fumbling motion towards his hip meant anything. Longtinsky closed the outer door—that leading to the alley—and also locked it. Then he returned to his first seat, leaned over the table and with a warning finger resting on the corner of his slovenly lips, looked over curiously to Pony and motioned for him to come and sit beside him.
_Page 120._]
That character, hitherto quite indifferent and evidently influenced by very contemptuous feelings for his friend, whose nature he knew, as well as some of his subterranean contrivance and plots, had become by this time aroused into curiosity. He looked at Longtinsky a moment with a very disagreeable leer, and then he laughed, picked up his chair and lurched around the table, and put himself at Longtinsky’s side;
“See here, Whiskers,” Pony’s voice sank to a guttural croak, “what’s your game now. No funny business, or up you go in smoke,” and a relevant movement of his right hand brought a six-shooter in proximity with Longtinsky’s ribs, with such painful effectiveness that that person’s color vanished, and his deprecatory retreat backward all but failed to overturn his chair, and deliver him on his back on the floor of the room. Something humorous shone in Pony’s eyes, and the next instant after a circular flourish of his weapon at a variety of objects around the room, he laid it on the table before him.
“Come Pony,” said Longtinsky, with jocular familiarity, “put it away. There’s no harm here for you. You’ve known me a long day and there never was a time when I haven’t been a good friend to you. Put it away. Jessie might come in here too. It would do you no good with her to have that iron out.”
The effect of this apostrophe was remarkable. The man grabbed his revolver, shoved it back in the holster at his hip beneath his coat, a smile entered his cynical face, as a beam of light might illumine into seemly grace a patch of darkness; he looked at Longtinsky with almost a beseeching motion, as he laid his hand caressingly on his arm:
“Tinsky, is Jessie here? Ah! Tinsky, you’re the father of that girl, and I _do_ love her! Blast the folly of it, but I’m a child in her fingers; I’m putty with her. I guess it’s the only thing that makes me run your errands, and hang at your elbow, like a dangling bell to a hound’s neck. Come Old Man, what’s your game? Jessie is the prize. I’m oyster for anything.”
This sudden mollification and surrender was more than gratifying to the plotting Tinsky. He showed no signs of immediate reassurance, but he felt the unmistakable power he possessed through the charm of his daughter for this blackguard’s eyes. Longtinsky laid his hand on Pony’s shoulders, shrugged his own lightly, and half closing his little eyes, watching shrewdly his confidant, spoke slowly, in a low voice, revealing bluntly his nefarious scheme.
“Pony, I’m not going to admit or deny what you’ve said. The high ends of popular liberation are served by all means the agencies of freedom find convenient to their hands”—a hostile imprecation, or something like it intimated to the apostle of the people that that line of adjustment would hardly be accepted. He continued:
“But we’ll drop that. There is danger for us all in this new move. That arch contriver Helen Lorimer intends to undermine us by the hypocrisy of clemency. She is the spring of action behind the Mayor. She expects to make us suspected by our own people. She is a whited sepulchre. For her own ends, for her class, for the greed of the debauched tribe of money-changers she is playing a double part to catch us in the net of her selfish ends, to thrust down the Eagle of Liberty—”
“Cut it out! Cut it out! Don’t for God’s sake, don’t cram any more of that lingo down my throat. What’s your game? Ecco! Out with it. Give it to me straight. Murder, arson, riot, poison, anything but your damn rot of fine words and humbug, Tinsky. You’re in this for keeps, and I’m with you—at least,” and the speaker shoved himself away from the anxious editor,—“as long as you play fair and game.”
Longtinsky smiled faintly: he knew he must go on. The risk was considerable, but concealment meant delay—delay, danger, and if this tool before him turned on him—now that his most faithful henchman Polinck was languishing in a public jail—there was a slim likelihood of his accomplishing anything. He was silent for one moment, and then trying to draw nearer to Pony whose robust criminality always antagonized his tortuous and deceitful projects, he whispered: “Pony, _Helen Lorimer must die_.”
This announcement veritably startled his hearer. Pony jumped to his feet, seized Longtinsky by the shoulders with both hands, and looked down on him with a ravenous surprise in his eyes, that made Longtinsky half regret his audacity. But the surprise passed. Pony had killed his men before. He fell back in his chair, and a kind of sanguinary unction sounded to Tinsky in his hoarse whisper;
“Good Tinsky—you’re a handsome guy to be plotting murder to save your own skin, and get a poor devil’s neck, like mine, kinked in a noose. Work a little quicker, old cut-throat. You know I like corpses, but just now I’d hate to get into a cold grave myself.”
Encouraged, Longtinsky continued. He dropped the gilded sophistry of his professional cant, and assumed the prerogatives of an initiated criminal. His own hatred for the class which constantly embodied to his eyes his personal enemies, his particular animosity for Helen Lorimer, whose virtues, goodness, and lofty altruism were incomprehensible to his sodden nature, except as the mask of an ulterior ambition, the wretched mess of deception into which circumstances—largely precipitated by his own waning prestige—had forced him, his consequent urgent danger, the sudden glimpse afforded him of a forcible egress into a field of new opportunities, and the pushing constraint of a kind of feverish despair made him suddenly truculent, unabashed and reckless.
“Pony,” he began again, “I’ll make a clean breast of it. I blew up the Settlement House. Polinck and I put the bombs there; Dalzell, Vinta, Ishpy, Charles Bingo, Fabrizio, Spesca, Rinker, and the rest were hired to go in, one hour after we lit the fuses. The janitor was bribed—and—” the speaker grinned diabolically— “it was money from the Silk Stockings that did it. They sent an agent to him. It was a plot; that witch Helen Lorimer wanted her House blown up. She meant it to bring ruin on us. I was fooled. The janitor came to me and promised to open the place if I wanted him to. He left, the house open, and went away—and I dropped into the trap. I meant no harm to the men. Some one had to do it—for the effect—don’t you see—_the effect_. I thought the East Side would rise,—but the police got wind of it too soon. The men might have got away, and none the wiser but some one peached, and that very night when the house burned, and I had started the revolution—” Longtinsky for an instant looked self-deceived, as if his aspirations for a New Dispensation, with himself as its protagonist was a sacred hope, “—that night every reserve in the city had been doubled, and—you know the rest—six of my men were nabbed with Polinck; the uprising nipped; locust clubs killed the new republic.”
By this time Pony was fully interested; he no longer shrank from the portentous confession. His indolent attention had been replaced by a very alert ear and eye, and not a word was missed, not a reflexion of the utterance, in the face of the narrator, escaped him. He had suspected much of this, some of it he almost could have sworn to. He felt repugnance for the perfidy of the man who could thus coolly rehearse all of this with a callous and untouched heart. But it stimulated his own thoughts, to run rebelliously along a chain of images, in which he saw Longtinsky dead, and himself with Jessie in his arms fleeing the country, the demolition of The Beehive, and his own comfortable existence elsewhere, with a sack of plunder torn from its vindictive and over credulous editor. The dream pleased him, and Longtinsky for once shone to him with an interior and native light of reasonableness, that made him—Pony—urbane and receptive, a transformation not concealed from Longtinsky, whose perception of it only made him more communicative and less cautions.
“You see,” continued Longtinsky, “the reprieve will act as a stay to the execution, of course, and the new trial will not come off until the fall. That is sure. There is time for me to undo the mischief we have suffered. I’ll fill The Beehive with storming articles. Careful you know Pony. I’ll rouse the men we need and I will be bold too; I’ll let out at that woman again, and she can come back at me. I can tell her plans to a dot. She will be down on the East Side again; she will put up some shack and start in with her talks. I’ll bait her all right, and get her in some sort of an argument and then—with our men ready—armed, Pony—we do it. _The bomb, Pony, that blows her to perdition will win you Jessie._”
The speaker paused, watching with a flicker of madness in his eyes, as he fed by anticipation upon the ruthless sweetness of his vengeance, and the intoxicating prizes of success, the ardent countenance of Pony, to whom the offer glittered with all the radiance of happiness, complete and inexhaustible.
There was a moment’s silence between the men; Longtinsky never lifted his eyes from the face before him, which responded to an inner elation, and grew good and wholesome under the gentle influence of the exultant and comforting thoughts that Jessie’s name aroused. Longtinsky himself felt the benign touch somehow of his daughter’s name, and there poured into his lowering glance the restful smile of a father’s love. Surely Love—thinking of the abused word in the loftiest sense, as the guerdon of unselfish sacrifice, and devotion—can work, and it alone, the miracle of Redemption!
Pony extended his hand, and Longtinsky was not slow to grasp it. “Done. I’m game for the throw, hit or miss. But a bargain’s a bargain, and _you_ Longtinsky either stick to it, or QUIT BREATHING.” Again the baleful lights in the eyes of both, and the evanescent ray of Heaven’s sunshine on their faces faded away with the harvest of suspicions springing anew in their plotting brains.
There was a light tap on the inner door, which led to the printing and composing room of the paper, and Longtinsky recognized it; “Here is Jessie now,” he said, and before he could extricate himself from the table and chair in whose legs his own had become wound, Pony leaped to his feet, and opened the door.
How strange are the contrasts of Nature’s works; with what necromantic art she weaves the dreadful and the harmless, the lovely, together! How perfectly she contrives—though there is no contrivance, only the mastery of metempsychosis—to mix her materials, the same material it would appear, and form from them now a demon, and now an angel. Or is it in this wise; that a little, Oh! so very little of some transforming juice of virtue can sway the ferment of a mass of rougher ruder stuff, making its effect at last beautiful, choice, and even more exquisite, because forsooth it has risen from its very opposites. Chemistry in our human arts does such things. Heredity is a fact, and yet Jessie was Longtinsky’s daughter. There she stood like some wild and winsome flower, flourishing in the midst of harshness and commonplaceness and reptilian motives. And so fresh and lovely! The arch play of her smile like a golden beam falling on ragged walls and blanched careworn faces, fell on the two men and their lifted heads bathed in it as if in a benediction.
Jessie Longtinsky—her mother was dead—was Longtinsky’s only child, and he lavished on her an unselfish care. She had learnt the most excellent rudiments of an English, German and French education; she spoke all these tongues; she had musical talent, and she developed taste and talent. But best of all the graces of an unsullied nature, a nature so vital and womanly, so confiding, earnest, and hopeful, so searchingly sincere, so buoyant, and yet very brave, dressed, God knows how, in the nobility of goodness.
Such graces were hers, and Jessie became them. They became her; it was an ideality of character and beauty, more piquant and entrancing because unexpected at first sight. It might have seemed almost impossible.
Jessie Longtinsky was fair, her hair literally golden, her features regular and perfectly harmonized, each formed so that it, by the most delightful collusion with the rest, added to the total witchery and charm. If hunting for some particular culprit among them all, that made her win from every one the meed of praise, it might best be attributed to her eyes, as indeed why not, seeing how joyous and soulful eyes can be. Jessie’s eyes were indeed most pretty, and they were not blue, as became convention, in the matter of eyes, with a fair skin, and the story teller’s golden hair. They were the faintest green, though that color craved no prominence in them, and often surrendered its claim, to be considered there at all, to a soft pearly grayness. And they were such honest eyes! Soft and reminiscent sometimes they were, and filling unbiddenly with tears, and then the home of mirth, but perhaps more usually they were tender and grave.
Longtinsky had had great luck in keeping his workmen, because they were young, and because they could frequently feast their amazed eyes on Jessie. Some had been ambitious in her regard but none had been successful, though Jessie managed to make the wound endurable, being calm and sensible and considerate. Among the habituées of the Longtinsky establishment—and they were many—Pony, or exactly Poniatowsky, had proved to be the most formidable suitor. Perhaps Jessie did not care much for him, but she humored him, she may have been a little afraid of him, and then her father favored him, _or seemed to_, and Jessie was a dutiful daughter. Longtinsky, as men will, even of the roughest, or the worst types, had guarded Jessie from contact with his own world of men; he did not converse about the social aims he had, he even kept his own paper out of his house, not because it was dirty or vile—which it was not—but because it was violent, sanguinary, maledictory and abusive. Longtinsky knew that, but these ways were his weapons. Mrs. Longtinsky probably was an amiable sweet woman, Jessie may have been like her, and so her father wanted to keep her, feeling too some masculine aversion to a femininity becoming raucous with debate and policies and doctrines.
As the door opened, Jessie glided past Pony who failed to catch her, and stood apart from the men turning from one to the other as if questioning their purpose to be locked up there. Then she looked around the room, which she seldom entered, in which no trace of that clean housewifery she practised in the story above the press room, and where Longtinsky dwelt, was visible. Her glance was furtive and shrinking, the place was distasteful; its staleness and meanness oppressed her, there lurked in it an unavoidable meaning of crime. She somehow felt that.
“Father, do let me change all this. I can. You won’t know it. With clean windows and curtains, fresh paper, lamps, a new ceiling, scrubbed floor, and that pretty old furniture in the attic; why it will be so different, so pleasant!”
“Now Jessie that wouldn’t do at all, not down here. If you made everything spick and span, we couldn’t think as well. It is hard enough sometimes to say what we want to say in the style we want, but because we don’t have to think where we are, and what’s about us, we do better. Come my girl, leave us. Pony and I have some things to talk about, which you aren’t interested in. Go up stairs.”
The voice of the speaker had lost its querulous murmur, and was soothing and even affectionate, with a plausible earnestness that discovered to the listener a father’s heart. And indeed there flickered up in Longtinsky, when Jessie was near him, a tenderness that would have saved him from many unruly and wicked impulses. It was the psychic radiance of her own excellence that brightened the dusky souls that came near her, and warmed their sensibilities, such as they had, into a responsive vigor. Jessie sat down, and a cloud of some sort of sadness passed over her face. Pony had been intently watching her, with now and then a perturbed glance at his rumpled clothes, which were not the habiliments he usually wore when anxious to move Jessie’s reluctant heart.
Pony considered himself the recognized swain of Jessie, though it would have been regarded as a mere piece of self flattery, a quite unsupported assumption, by any one permitted to study Jessie’s attitude towards him. She frankly did not like him, though Pony was at his best with her, and really loved her, and because he did, and was quite willing to go any lengths in supporting his claims, against all rivals, he, by a rustic and aboriginal force of argument, concluded she belonged to him, a conclusion not always agreeable to Longtinsky, and certainly not approved by Jessie herself.
Pony started towards her, with a smile of pleasure in his face, that intimated the probable intention of an osculatory salute, when Jessie moved quickly away to the further end of the table. A frown troubled Pony’s features, and threatened to break out in a stormy expostulation, when Jessie unexpectedly fixed the attention of the two men by a raised warning finger.
“Father, there are men outside in the yard watching the house. They came in through the alley a minute ago. I think they may be there yet. They may be your enemies!” Jessie of course knew her father was engaged in a propaganda of a civic nature, and the best sides of a humanitarian socialism appealed to her quite naturally. These she heard, and was honestly led to feel that the rich were the enemies of her class, of her father, of progress. She was cognizant of the higher types of socialism, as she had become acquainted with it in the books of Hilquitt, Marx, and others.
The recent riot, deaths, and the arrest of the conspirators, had been viewed by her with terror, and yet with an exalted conviction of its necessity. Through the sacrifice of the martyrs, she had been told, Liberty came into the world, and always would so come. She saw the sufferings of the very poor, and she exerted a beneficent influence among them, working with an eager sympathy for their good and improvement. She had in this wise done much to strengthen her father’s power, and the affection bestowed on the daughter was an effectual aid in assisting the projects of the father. But lately Jessie, unsuspected by Longtinsky, had come under the spell of Miss Lorimer, and the result threatened to bring about a little alienation for his schemes. However her love for him was true, and when that day, looking from the upper windows of the rear tenement, in which they lived, she saw the usually empty yard invaded by the strangers, and noticed their equivocal actions, she became alarmed, and had, for this reason, interrupted the unhealthy machinations of the two friends.
The two listeners to this startling news, jumped to their feet, and tiptoed to the window, on the yard side, and cautiously raising the corner of the shade, peered into the little yard which had been made into a grass plot, worn irregularly into bare patches, by the feet of those who frequented it, when, on summer nights, Longtinsky gathered there his sympathizers and co-workers, to smoke, and drink, and reform the crooked and nodding earth.
The view obtained under the lifted curtain was a very imperfect and partial one, but there indeed were the intruders walking towards the door of the room, where the watchers crouched. Neither Pony nor Longtinsky stirred, and Jessie behind them, trying to reassure herself over their shoulders, was quite still. Their common apprehension that the men would next instant present themselves for admission, at the door, was relieved when, with a last glance above them, and a review of the few features of the yard, the new comers turned into the alley and vanished. Pony stole to the door, opened it, and creeping outward, saw them disappear into the street, and the next instant an automobile puffed, shirred, tooted, and moved away through the throbbing thoroughfare, and in it sat—our former acquaintances—Mr. Benton Briggs, the mayor’s secretary, and Tom Ratler.
Now it happened, naturally that Jessie had not detailed the circumstances of her discovery, but that incident had consequences that later developed into pleasing importance. When Jessie discovered Mr. Briggs and his companion in the yard, she was at an open window engaged in watering some of her flower charges, and her particular bent attitude or position, had shot a tide of color into her face, so that when she raised herself and gazed down on the men, the eyes of Tom Ratler met a vision of beauty, which the rapidly working appreciation of that susceptible youth, approved as being the sweetest thing they had ever seen. And—happily let us say—this was not unreciprocated for, in the nascent powers of her own healthy observation, Jessie felt aware that the young man underneath her windows was particularly good-looking.
The immediate consequences of an encounter, fraught with such mutual pleasure, vary greatly, according to circumstances and temperament, but with Tom Ratler it produced a strong hope—not shared by Mr. Briggs—that he might have confided to him further work in the capture of the Longtinsky household. It seemed to him that his intervention was necessary, for the security of the defenceless and innocent maiden connected as he discovered,—from Mr. Briggs—by a filial relation to the obnoxious Longtinsky. As to the effect of the same encounter with Jessie herself, it deepened her repugnance for Pony, and made a fluttering sensation discernible in the neighborhood of her heart, that, with more sophisticated girls, would have been indubitably assigned to recondite and tender sympathies.
There was some natural confusion of mind, a little trepidation perhaps, caused by this interruption, and when Pony had returned, Longtinsky and he exchanged irresolute glances which finally adjusted themselves into a settled stare of wonder, while through all this mute interchange of ocular interrogation Jessie stood apart, with her own eyes questioning each of the conspirators. At length Pony broke out;
“I tell you Longtinsky: it’s cut for you. That young chap is the Mayor’s shover, and the old dog is his secretary. They’re on a spying trip; looking the ground over, and before you can say Jack Robinson they’ll have the service men down here, and the whole outfit under lock and key.”
While he was speaking Longtinsky’s head was, metaphorically, whirring with the soundless revolutions of all its interior clockwork, wheels, cogs, and pins. He saw too, that there was a suggestion, in this sudden visit of inspection on the part of the Mayor’s forces of just such a predicament and complication as would allow him to reanimate and reestablish his prestige.
He could now, if the attack was made, the suppression of his paper attempted, raise an outcry against the tyranny of such suppression, the danger of Star Chamber proceedings against the freedom of the press and, sounding the tocsin of alarm over the encroachments of government upon the Palladium of liberty. He might add recruits to his cause, drawn from a class usually out of sympathy with him, while his own followers could be roused into an acute resentment. This latter fanned into a blaze, might create the kind of conflagration he needed for his own escape from censure, and for the completion and execution of his felonious designs. These possibilities rapidly formed themselves in his mind into a logical chain of events, which expeditiously utilized, would immensely further his plans.
He turned sharply to his daughter and said: “Jessie go up stairs, and leave us. You were right to tell us about these spies, and now Pony and I must talk over the matter. Do go!” He approached his daughter whom he truly loved, and putting his hand around her neck kissed her with an ardor that reacted dangerously on Pony’s self-control. That envious gentleman hurried also to Jessie’s side, and was in the act of throwing both his arms around her, when she sprang sideways, escaped him and fled.
Pony’s pursuit was unsuccessful, and he fell over a chair which sent him sprawling against the wall. He was up in an instant, and furious with disgust and disappointment. He would have renewed the chase, had not Longtinsky shut the door past which Jessie had fled, through the press room to her own quarters, and placed himself in the way of the infuriated lover.
Pony stopped; it was not Longtinsky’s formidable frame that caused him to pause; a sudden thought of the handsome Tom Ratler, whom he had seen before, connected itself with the flight and reluctance of Jessie to submit to his embraces. The idea suffocated him. It made him fall back into a chair with a groan and a curse and then his hands clutched the table, he shook it, as if the desperation of his jealousy would reek itself upon this insensate object.
“Damn him,” he cried, “let him come between me and Jessie, and I’ll tear his liver out of his black body. No I’ll do better than that. I’ll mark him for life; I’ll slash his pretty face into strips, and break his legs. A monkey on crutches. Ha! Ha! A fine figure he’ll cut then,” and the fiend gloating over his imaginary revenge drew his knife and struck the table before him with repeated blows.
Longtinsky watched this outbreak with some satisfaction. His acrobatic mind saw that through the incentives of this jealousy on the part of Pony, he could engage that desperate man to do his bidding. He could involve all his enemies—the antagonists of his propaganda—in this man’s hate, and when the moment arrived and the blow was to be struck he could inflame his exasperation to the point where Helen Lorimer—Longtinsky’s rage against this woman partook of the nature of a mania—would become confused or identified with his personal rival, and, relying on his furious love for his daughter, through Pony’s arm, he might strike her down. At present he must decamp, but so arrange things that the police should seize the place—which he would make an empty trophy by its evacuation—and then he would elsewhere publish his grievances and ring the changes upon an outraged liberty.
“Listen to me, Pony,” said Longtinsky to the glowering lover, “all that in time, but now we must get out of this, and save the plant. To-night you must help me to move. There’s a house up Pitt Street that I can get into and there we will go, Jessie and all. In spite of them all we’ll print The Beehive, and we’ll make it hotter than ever. Understand! Come! there’s no time to lose. Remember you stay with us and—” it was his decisive stake “—play the game right, and Jessie is yours.”
Pony leaped to his feet and seized Longtinsky’s hand and the two men disappeared into the inner sanctum.
That night and for some succeeding nights there was much smothered activity in the region of the office of The Beehive. Pony and Longtinsky now banded together in a confirmed partnership wherein the motives of the second outstripped the merely egotistic designs of the first, were busy with the removal of the various archives of the socialistic paper, and engaged too in a wholesale destruction of the more compromising issues of the past year. They worked efficiently and Pony derived a gratification from the occasional help of Jessie who had learned from her father of the impending removal. The old office was left intact with its signs and furniture but the presses were taken to a new retreat in Pitt Street, not far from the site of the ruined Settlement House, and the preparations made for the continuous printing of the paper, but, under the fear of some impending blow, their distribution was secretly arranged, and at the same time the bitterness of their editorials increased. They instilled insidiously a poisonous venom against society, and they craftily wove into all their allusions the name of Helen Lorimer as the embodiment of the wrongs the deluded readers were convinced they suffered. Yet all this was not unopposed; the contingent which Miss Lorimer had gathered around her at the Settlement was very faithful, and Longtinsky regarded with alarm the preparations for rebuilding the Settlement House. The moment must be soon improvised for his blow, wherein the purpose of outright murder steadily and grimly deepened.